HERODOTUS' THEORY. 



67 



been shaped by a turner's la the. The Oracle of Delphi was the 

 centre of his system. 



Somewhat later, Thales, one of the Seven Sages, declared his 

 belief that the earth was spherical, and remained suspended in 

 mid air without support of any kind. This frightful doctrine 

 made few proselytes: it was not likely, indeed, that any one 

 but a sage would adopt a theory which made him the inhabitant 

 of a globe abandoned and isolated in the midst of space. 



In the fifth century before Christ, Herodotus, the most cele- 

 brated traveller of antiquity, and consequently capable of form- 

 ing rational ideas upon the subject of geography, rectified many 

 errors which had crept into the popular belief, though Homer was 

 still considered infallible by the masses of the people. " I 

 know of no such river as the ocean," he says, ironically: 44 this 

 denomination seems to be a pure invention of Homer and the* 

 old poets. I cannot help laughing when I hear of the river' 

 Ocean, and of the spherical form of the earth, as if it were the 

 work of a turner." He displaced the centre of the inhabited 

 surface, which the Greeks had at first made Mount Olympus 

 and afterwards Delphi, making Rhodes the fortunate possessor 

 of the privilege. Socrates, a century later, (400 B.C.,) asserted 

 that the earth was in the form of a globe, sustained in the middle 

 of the heavens by its own equilibrium. 



About the year 230 B.C., Eratosthenes, a Greek of Cyrene, 

 succeeded in reducing geography to a system, under the patron- 

 age of the Ptolemies of Egypt, which gave him access to the 

 immense mass of materials gathered by Alexander and his suc- 

 cessors and accumulated at the Alexandrian Library. The 

 spherical form of the earth was now quite generally considered 

 by scientific men to be the correct theory, though it could 

 never be substantiated till some navigator, sailing to the east, 

 should return by the west. Eratosthenes, proceeding upon this 

 principle, made it his study to adjust to it all the known features 

 of the globe. The great ocean of Homer and Herodotus, 



